Global Economy — 2026-04-23

NPT Review Conference Opens April 27 Amid Collapsed Arms Control Framework

The 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty convenes in New York on April 27, the first since New START expired on February 5, leaving no binding limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972. Conference President Du Hong Viet warned that without concrete outcomes the NPT review process itself risks losing credibility. The Arms Control Association's analysis identifies zero active arms control negotiations among the five NPT nuclear-armed states. The US delegation lacks prior NPT experience, and President Trump has threatened resuming nuclear explosive testing, jeopardizing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Analysis
Du Hong Viet's public credibility warning signals that procedural failure is NPT insiders' default expectation, not a tail risk. Per the Arms Control Association's cycle-by-cycle analysis (carrying an institutional advocacy bias toward arms control), no pre-conference evidence of draft text convergence, Russian signaling, or US-Russia thaw has surfaced. The reference class of consecutive failures in 2015 and 2022 under less adverse structural conditions makes a consensus final document very unlikely by end of May. A delegation without NPT institutional memory eliminates the face-saving compromise path that historically requires deep procedural fluency. States facing a third consecutive failure may nonetheless accept deliberately vague lowest-common-denominator language, as they did in 2010, making some form of consensus text marginally more plausible than structural conditions alone suggest.

1 sources

The NPT System Hangs in the Balance - Arms Control Association